


The Samahl Sulahna: Second Collection

by Keturagh



Series: The Samahl Sulahna [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Bratting, Caning, Dom Solas, Dom/sub, F/M, Fluff, Masturbation, Porn with Feelings, Public Blow Jobs, Public Masturbation, Public Sex, Rimming, Rough Sex, Sex, Sex with Clothes On, Smut, Solavellan, Spanking, Spanking with wooden spoon, Spooning, Sweet Moments, dom!solas, not THAT kind, solavellan hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:42:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9838526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: Samahl Sulahna: Songs of Laughter, Second CollectionShort works chronicling the romance of Solas and Pangara. Their time together is rooted in love, trust, and longing. In their sexual dynamic Pangara plays the role of a rebellious brat, and Solas very much enjoys disciplining and dominating her. The start of their sexual relationship is chronicled in Slip. Indv. chapters rated below.Pieces:Ithink how it wakes the seeds(fluff ~ elves in Spring, pre-Fade kiss)IIragged, everywhere(explicit ~ solo!solas in a ruin)IIIsweat(explicit ~ sex with clothes on)IVfrescoes(slice of life ~ the artist at work)Vmore and more drastic(explicit ~ dom!solas delivers a caning punishment)VIthe world goes together(slice of life ~ Dread Wolf)VIIlight from sleep(explicit ~ D/s, rimming, public sex)VIIIwriting wants flesh(fluff ~ stress and illiteracy)IXthe retreat(slice of life ~ papae solas at the beach)Xdrums(explicit ~ beat with a wood spoon)XIthe road of evening(slice of life ~ Pangara returns to Wycome and her clan for a time after Corypheus is defeated)





	1. think how it wakes the seeds

**title prompt from Futility by Wilfred Owen**

\--

He hears the heavy fall of the oak door slamming into place and swings his legs over the side of the couch. It is the breath that seeps under the door this morning; he has felt it too, growing in the heat of the sun on the mountainside. He did not know if she would feel it. But it is the earliest crest of dawn and the closing of the door to her chambers is loud in the stillness of the rest of the castle. Expelled from dreaming by a restlessness hours before, he has laid, waiting (telling himself he is not waiting) for the sound. The fall of her footsteps. The closing of her door.

He hears the echoes like she is passing straight through the great hall and he scrambles, first towards the rotunda’s egress, then he stops. Reconsiders. Walks swiftly towards the training yard door instead. He settles his vest around his shoulders as he walks. He ducks to lift his pack from where it slouches against the mural beside the tunnel. The tankard and the bone horn clatter, knock hollowly as he eases the pack over his shoulders.

He emerges from his door at the same time she exits hers.

Not that he planned such.

Listening. His hand on the knob. Forgetting to breathe, nervous.

She looks over at him, all caution and wary surprise, before she sees that it is him.

And then she removes the pieces of him that hurt with the way her face changes, brightens, and when she speaks it is the first song of morning.

“ _Solas_!” And even though they have shared so much together, the unrestrained joy impacting him now is an open and endearing shock. Her smile is easy, energetic, and even pleased. Pleased to see him. Pleased to be awake. Pleased by the warm turning of the earth, the exultant feeling in the air. She rushes down the stone steps and he watches her. They are being pulled apart by the distance, but he can still hear her, he walks quickly over the bridge, keeps her in sight, listens to her exclaim, “You felt it, too! Last night I was certain I’d… I’d burst, I don’t know. Just, can you just feel - it’s so clear up here. Do you feel that? Do you _feel_?”

And he tries to control the grin he feels growing on his lips, in his eyes, at how excited she is. He nods, considers, and then answers, “I feel it. You are right; it is strong.”  


He carries his voice down to where she’s standing; she beams up at him. Her arms are spread out, wide, side-to-side. She is loose and free in a way that is purely for herself. It is uncharacteristic - and the thought bites him, because of course it is his fault that her happiness is uncharacteristic in this place.

“Get down here fast, dreamer. We’ll just take the one.” And he’s been invited to join her and he feels like he has stolen something so beautiful that he will clutch at it for the rest of his days.

When he reaches her she’s already led the stag from the stables, bridled, but not saddled. She reaches out to him. He boosts her easily enough (outwardly controlled, inwardly faint), and then mounts behind her. The long hair is bristly, scratching through his leggings. There is room for distance between their bodies, and he maintains it - she clicks, her thighs flex, and they are carried forward. As they pass the tavern she reins in, tilts her chin up and wonders aloud, “Does Sera feel it, you think?”  


Part of him stiffens against this possibility. But the gentler, less selfish man in him prevails in an instant. “It would be good if she allowed herself to feel this. Would you like me to go and see if she is willing, awake? I can rouse her.”

Pangara is quiet, for a moment. She gazes up at the tavern window. He feels her warring within herself. And then she makes a choice, and he is surprised that her choice gives him pause, because, he realizes, it disappoints him.

She slides her gaze straight ahead over the stag’s antlers. “No. Leave her.”

Flexing her thighs again and clicking her tongue, she spurs the stag forward. They are quiet together, and she is distant from him as they leave the yard and then the gate. He nods to the two guardsmen, she raises a hand in greeting. And as they cross the bridge, and the wind picks up and her shoulders loosen, and the hair at the nape of her neck pulls and willows in the breeze, and she breathes in sharply, through her nose, and he feels extraordinary - they open back up to the morning. To the warmth of it. To the sun cresting the horizon like a guilty lover. The dawnstar lingering at the hilly crest of frost. And everything around and under and over them thrums and whispers, “ _Spring. Spring. Spring._ ”

Soon they are galloping. She is laughing. Solas reaches out and his arms encircle her waist, she leans them both forward, holding the reins loose, her back is warm against his chest. She whoops. He is smiling open-mouthed, foolish, chin nuzzling against her neck despite himself. She arches back against him, exalts, and they are over the bridge and she veers them to the woodland road, to bring them quickly down into the treeline where already morning sounds of blackcap, warbler, finch, and wren welcome them, embrace them, invite and sing out to the turning year.

When in the shade of trees, the night seems to reclaim them. The sun is still too weak to warm the snow. They slow to a sedate pace. A stick breaks to the left of the trail; a badger, he sees, just as it flashes into shadow. The stag startles and its flesh beneath their legs trembles and ripples. She croons low, settling the stag’s dancing hooves with subtle suggestions of her knees and heels. Solas sits back, carefully away from her, and then lowers a hand to pat the stag’s back.

“Your carriage has become quite skilled.”

The rolling _phwoo-phwoo-hoo_ call of a grace owl reaches them through the trees. Her eyes are crinkling, a green that dazzles him even beside this canopy. “Kind way to say that I have slightly less chance of breaking my neck now. The _mood_ in this _son-of-a_. I never thought I’d meet a thing with so little shame in such a cruel temper.” The stag snorts, and they both chuckle. Then they fall into an easy silence, passing under the thick, stiff-bristled trees.

He shifts his shoulders down and back, tilts his chin up and lets his eyes close. How many springs had he let let pass without heeding this call? Dismissing this chorus? The sun pot-bellied on the horizon before he noticed that the world had turned?

He opens his eyes and she is looking back at him. He cannot read her expression. Then she points. The woods might seem still as the sky lightens and the stars, through the branches, dim. But she notices, as he does, the flickering of each branch, and he follows her gesture to see where a bluebird with brilliant plumage has settled on the pine. He turns back to her and then his gaze flicks up and he lifts his hand, points beyond her head. She turns and breathes in, sharp, stunned. The owl is massive. They do not reach this size in the lower lands. It is set back from them, deep in the trees, and its talons scrape when it flexes its grip. Gold, glowing eyes turn to view them, its head swiveling smooth and liquid, somber. It blinks. Its wings unfurl. Rolling like a mist down the mountainside, it bounces from the branch and into the air, ghosting into the darkness of the deeper forest.

The sound she makes is worshipful, and for once he does not mind.

He is tugged into it too.

It is when the sun crests enough to break through the canopy and dot the ground with shifting shadows that they realize they have arrived. It is no specific place, but he sees she recognizes it around the same time he does. Maybe a little delayed. Drawn from their separate thoughts, they smile at one another, each a little shy.  
She slides from the stag’s back. He dismounts and she reaches up to steady him on his feet, though he does not need the help. Her fingers press the crude stitching of his vest. She pulls at a loose string. He feels less steady than when his feet first touched the ground.

She steps away and her smile grows broad as she looks around at the trees, the sounds of the birds, the moving chaos of light and air in the dawn.

Then she reaches into the pouch at her waist and pulls out a hard, round cake. Breaks it in half and offers it to him. The scent is deeply aromatic, herbal. They raise their halves to press back together, eyes meeting. He sees the honey gold of her cheeks deepen, tries to match the red to something in his mind so that he can recall this moment again later with ease. He fights the urge to step closer to her, to lower his mouth over hers.

“En annar enanalsulahna,” she says. To the year’s gifted song.

His lips quirk; he bows his head slightly, to her. They eat their portions, turning to walk side by side.

_Warm. Warm. Warm,_ says the breeze that shakes the squirrels from their trees.

The stag digs at the snowy earth behind them. It scrapes up a smell of soil and loam.

The chatter above them is raucous now. It is a thousand thousand calls. It is threads of daylight piercing down a shrieking, vibrating song through every living thing. He feels the Veil bow and tremble against it; the temptation of light, the tidal crush of a heat that pours once more into the earth.

He has her on his arm. They stride together. Their feet could leave the ground.

She rests her head against his arm.

He swallows. His eyes close once more.

She breaks from him. It is sudden. She runs ahead and leaps, twisting her torso in the air. She spins on landing, breaths coming light and fast. She laughs up at the trees and he is stunned, his hands twitching, staring at her, unable to think or move or breathe.

It is like it was before. He never thought to see it… Home, inside her. Home. And as it should have been. Free.

The way her arms have weight and strain and heaviness in them, as she moves her body in the swollen song of morning - it wrestles within him. He does not move, rooted, trying not to betray the guilty mixture of fascination, aching melancholy, and arousal thudding within him; he is enraptured, the ground warms beneath his feet.  


She moves absolutely without care for him. She is entirely her own. Inhabits a space that is deeply internal, moved by the reaching season wrapping its arms around her. She claps, twists, stretches. Moves slow and deliberate, muscles taut, then flows with grace into a step that leads him to follow her, padding, over fallen branches and around outcropping rocks. She leaps up and grabs a low-hanging branch and just hangs, breathing hard. Drops of dew, melted snow, bounce and drop around her ears and make rivers down her hands, wrists, arms. Her head is tilted back and dappled in the sun.

She releases the branch and drops. Crouches. Sits, and then rocks back, pulling the air deep into her chest, sweat at her hairline and trickling down her throat. She is as unguarded as he has ever seen her.

He hangs back, reverent also, in his own way, in this mood of change and newness. He leans back against the mean bark of a pine, and the vibration of life travels through his body - oozing sap and the scritching claws of birds and the song filling, filling him.

His eyes open when he feels her hands. She weaves her fingers around his. Grips her palms against his, then slackens this feeling. And they are filled with each other’s pulses. The green rising, the sun now mounted into the air, and the trees unbearably alive and busy and feeling a promise in the breeze, the breeze that has gentled and now urges and entices everywhere it touches: _Now. Now._

There is no time but the moving of the earth and the sun and the air and the song. Their hands entwine and hold and they forget to look away, and this touch becomes dance and song and pulse and walk. Tree and wing. Snowmelt and the heart of fire that now rushes between them in the wind, moves her hair, rustles his clothing: across from one another, and deep in the feeling, the call.

After the crescendo, he leans forward. He presses his lips on the salt of her brow.

He hears her breathe and her eyes seem pressed shut tight. But when she laughs, he knows she watches him still. She's spying on his smile; her eyes are just a little open.


	2. ragged, everywhere

**Prompt: Ruins: “the jackdaws in all their ragged black shinery - part Watch me, part Close your eyes - and everywhere the summer roses” (Cloud Country, Carl Phillips, Speak Low)**

\--

Sinking into the grass below the crumbling wall, he has to catch his breath a moment because this was a place of ethereal beauty, in its time. A place of joined murals and the gentle feeling of watching blackbirds flit among the vines. And it disorients him, extraordinarily, to see it here. On the ground. Because when he last snuck around that corner, it was occupying the space where the jackdaws circle now, high above his head, and he wars with a feeling of imagined vertigo at walking in this place again.

She puts her hand on his back.

“Are you ill, Solas?”

He shakes his head, short, and then rolls his shoulders back stiffly.

“I am disturbed by a memory of what I once encountered here in the Fade. The Veil is stuttering, weak. We must find the artifact of my people.”

Pangara nods, looks hurt - he realized it a moment too late, the slipped phrase - and she moves away from him. He straightens and reaches out to stroke against the Veil, searching for a place that emanates a solidity in the Veil. Though he had marked this spot in his mapping of the overall structure, he had not erected this node himself. But even through the thousands of years he remembers: one life lost in installing this point in secret. Three more lost in holding the door while the Veil’s strength grew. Four freed Elvhen who made their stand against the false gods, and knew their liberty in death.

He stands tall. She calls to him and he finds her in an alcove behind an old wood door, something newer that indicates these ruins were adopted for some purpose after their fall. He shows her again how to fold the Fade through the Veil and around the orb like a smothering blanket, and then they work together to drag threads of Veil through the mooring points, securing the pieces of the Fade that have started to bulk through. This will not hold. He feels the now-familiar thrust of panic rising in his chest. There are too many pieces missing. The structure has degraded. Will he have enough time?

The fall in her face, her hurt, haunts him that night. He has realized that she shows him these things very intentionally. Not just him, no. All of her companions. She is aware of the way in which she should place her words, her carriage, and her disposition to make these strangers feel comfortable. Valued. She is a natural leader. Or she has been taught well, he considers. She is careful in how she dispenses her appreciation, her need, and her praise.

And how she communicates her pain.

He invokes this last so often that it is shameful.

He groans into his arm flung over his face.

Because thinking of her face. Her lips. The green of her eyes. The quiet and certain intelligence challenging him there. Even twisted in pain.

He pictures her.

He is _awake_.

He had chosen not to sleep in the tent he would be asked to share with Varric. Finding a place under the vine-woven stones of the old walls of Vir Sul, he had shrugged off his coat and leaned against the wall, intent on revisiting the moment of the palace’s fall if he could find such an ancient echo in the Fade.

But he is painting in his mind the shade of her cheek, he is adding shadow to the lid of her eye, he is trying to capture the lace of oil in her hair after three weeks’ travel.

He keeps his eyes shut as he reaches below his breeches, takes his length in hand, hard, aching, although he should not. He should wait until he can attend to this as just the rote maintenance of a body afflicted with lust and longing. Picture her as he has before: in the moments he has made her smile, or the glowing moments he has impressed her; or when she has mystified him and he has found himself drawn to watch her work two people through an argument. Watching her out of the corner of his eye, studying the way she fights for compromise or judgement.

He should not, feeling like filth, indulge himself with raw, torturous touches. Should not, after a moment’s restraint, prime his middle finger against his thumb and then, taking a shaky, long breath, flick his testes hard, hard enough to make himself give a muffled cry and hiss, doubling over the sloshing daggers of pain that stab up through his gut. He should not groan with the twisted pleasure of indulging his mind’s desire to fixate on the downturn of her mouth, the draw in her brows, the slightest snarl of disappointment in her cheek. He is sorry, but he is too proud to tell her. And he knows this would make her scoff, dismissive. No patience for his pride, for his willingness to hurt and injure - obstinate.

He has been trying to not admit that he is thinking of her, and only of her, for hours. Playing over that moment again and again in his mind. Tracing every feature of her face as it looks to him with… disgust.

He cannot stop now. He grasps himself in his palm and his mind goes mercifully blank, all his feeling concentrated in the bulging of his cock in his grip. Hurriedly, he licks his hand from wrist to fingertip and yanks himself, rhythm tight and hard and quick and _get it over with_. He pulls his sweater and then his shirt up away from his stomach. Comes with a slamming, blinding heat. Finishes his spend, pumping weakly, grimacing and shuffling, already, with his other hand in his pack to take a cloth and wipe the creamy mess from his skin.

He should have come into the handkerchief, or the grass. The stickiness is cool in the night air. Peering down, he sees a white stain lining the hem of his bunched sweater.

He huffs, and tries to calm the spark of irritation. He will launder the sweater in the morning. It is no matter.

But he knows he simply wants no reminder.

He settles himself back into his breeches, pulls his clothing roughly into place. Rests his arm back over his eyes. He tries, as the whisper of magic emanates from around the corner, to enter the Fade without the vision of her eyes tilted to look up at his; without remembering grasping her hips and turning her. He tries to not allow his mind to drift to the last time they met in the Fade, and to the fire in her lips.

He focuses his mind. He tries to seek something ancient, something that is not heat and heartbeat and there in his mind - always, her lips quirking at him, there behind his eyes.


	3. sweat

**Prompt: Rainstorm: “Less a place/than a quality of heat/and sweat.” (The Attic, Judith Skillman, Coppelia, Certain Digressions)**

\--

Pinned between the rock and his body, he is lowering his teeth to her breasts and his lips are drawn back and he pulls a keening sound out of her throat when he bites her nipple, a warbling choking gasp and his hands are wide on her hips, guiding her to grind against the thigh that he’s nudged up between her legs.

“Rut. Harder.” he says against her breast.

She complies, whimpering, and they are both soaked. The rain rolls down in torrents, in punishing piercing sheets. She runs her hands over his wet, glistening head, dips to cover it, hot, with her lips, tonguing out to lick his brow, the stubble pulling rough on her tongue, because she wants him to know that she has wanted to do this since… since when? When did she first really notice his head? The baldness, the shine they ribbed him for. The distinction of it, the way it made his hard cheeks and sharp jaw look younger, the way -

He pulls her hips forward and there’s almost frustration in the grapple.

“Harder.” His voice lilts up, making the command seem like poetry, and she grits her teeth and she throws her head back and jerks her hips wild and wrecking on his thigh.

He groans, and he shudders, and she loses herself for a moment.

“Good,” he whispers.

She wants him to move her shirt - unpin her buttons or draw his hands and push the fabric up along her stomach - but he works her nipple between his lips and teeth as it strains hard and sensitive and wet through the cotton. He bites soft and slow, too slow, agonizing and transferring lightning, the _idiot_ , through his _teeth_ and shocking the rise of her nipple just so subtly, the magic just enough, and she wails and begs and requests _so kindly_ if he wouldn’t _please just more_.

The shape of his smirk on her breast is unmistakable. She grips his head harder, fingers curling around his ears, and rolls her hips against him the way she knows incites him: slow, with a certain catch in her moan, ass tipping and jutting out and, in moments, yes, his hands are wrapping back to clutch her and his mouth quickens on her breast and he helps her move against him, losing his control too.

The water sluices down into her eyes. It drips off her lips as her mouth hangs open around his name. She groans it open-mouthed again, and again, and she is so deliriously close. He hiccups, stiffens, and she hears him groan, “ _No_ ,” and then he is shuddering and he’s jerked his fingers up into the divot of her smalls, and he rubs certain and _hard and just right how does he_ against her so she comes for him, pouring and wailing and soaking the garments that are already soaked with rain, and she can’t see the outline of his spend in his breeches either because all of their clothes are dark with storm and sweat.


	4. frescoes

**Prompt:[this post](https://sulahnenasalin.tumblr.com/post/122544768009/lets-talk-solas-frescoes-solas-paintings-are)**

\--

Solas kneels to lift the shards of the Orb, his key. He turns the broken pieces in his hands and realizes that he must now claim the piece of Mythal’s power that remains in this world. He has failed her, and now he has no choice left but to do her vessel great injury in order to restore the world of the elves.

The wolf will strike down the dragon.

Solas leaves the companions on the mount. He travels quickly. He will take minimal supplies. He enters the fortress on the paths only he is left to remember. He takes what he needs from the library under the keep. Enters the rotunda. Considers the final panel, the scaffolding still moved from yesterday’s preparation of the wall. His hands twitch. _Perhaps… Perhaps, even still, this extraordinary leader, this hero, could…_ He moves to gather his supplies. Tools scraping, folding and kneading the plaster. A familiar, almost soothing task. He smears the base onto the wall, wondering how long it will take the others to ensure nothing remains of the magister and make their way slow and celebrating over the peaks. The piece will be rough, inelegant, straightforward. He does not have time for more. He works directly into the plaster. Three violent guiding lines. No, too large, he must be swift - he scratches in a fourth line that shrinks the composition. What.. is he trying to say? What is he hoping for? The lines carved; too quickly - he goes over the curve in the wing again. And again. His hand shakes.

“Messere Solas?”

He does not turn, he does not speak. He cannot acknowledge anything outside of the work that lies ahead. The sword irritates him - the shape of the cross-guard. Sloppy. He cannot linger on it. The archivist is still there when he descends the scaffolding, pushes past him, starts to mix the paints.

“The others are returning, Messere Solas; I was asked to invite you to join the receiving celebration in the courtyard. They have been sighted by the base camp.”

His heart pounds. Then there is no time. He settles for a single pigment, gives a strained and grateful nod. Dismisses the archivist, more curt than he’d like to be remembered; the young man had always expressed a valiant kindness towards him.

When he is alone he paints. At first he is unable to shake the habit of care, outlining with diligence the shape of monstrosity. Then he surrenders to his hatred of the work. Of the deed and of the man who must, of the duty which means he must - . His arm jerks and he moves in huge strokes, watery pigment dripping and smearing and if he had time he would have made this a deep and bloodied red. And when he hears the cheering rise he scrambles from the scaffolding. Collects his pack. Does not look back at the ruined walls of the rotunda. It is fitting, he thinks viciously. And then he pushes the thought from his mind: another spoiled work. A failure to endure the next one thousand years. Another mistake. He has no more strength, and he leaves the stronghold quietly, and he is careful not to be seen.


	5. more and more drastic

**Canyon: fluid melodic / getting more and more drastic / the moment she gives in to him / she regrets it / a throat a chest / trying to press themselves (All the Flourishes in the World, Dale Going)**

\--

It was something he had whispered to her three days prior, the promise delivered as they left the watering hole with full flasks. Dragonthorn scraped against their shins as they waded knee-deep through the brush.

Pangara had stopped walking.

He’d continued on, her moan abrupt and choked behind him. He’d ducked his gaze back to spy her posture, weakened and yearning, and he’d covered the movement by dabbing the top of his head dry of sweat on his sleeve. The heat like scales had been burning against their bodies for days. Comparatively, travelling along the base of the canyon was sweet respite. An abundance of shade, except at midday. And the wind, still strong and carrying the blaze of sun through their clothes, was at least less apt to slam up a mouthful of sand at any unwary moment.

Now, as she arched up against him in the cold, too cold, desert night and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and as he buried a hand up her shirt and palmed her breast’s soft give, gliding her nipple under his thumb as she kissed him, desperate, Solas struggled to reclaim the smooth control of that moment.

What was it, exactly, she had said?

“ _Isala_ -”

No.

He disciplined his mind.

Before.

On their way down the ladder into the canyon. What she had said under her breath, a vocal tic in direct violation of their rules regarding such language:

“Don’t catch me if I fall.”

His ardor chilled. He left a final, gentle kiss, tasting of her swollen mouth with just the tip of his tongue. And then he pulled away. And Pangara stiffened and stared up at him in a way that assured him that she remembered the moment by the water as clearly as he did. He looked at her. Folded his right hand up behind the small of his back and grasped his left wrist, straightening his shoulders down and back. He waited.

A steely moment hung between them. He watched her eyes reflect the green glow of the veilfire. The light jumped in the lantern and cast fitfully over the charred wreck of the wagon. It was a sickle-moon night; the darkness afforded them some measure of privacy from the eyes back at the encampment, but necessity kept them near. The scouts on guard had looked carefully away as he had lead her from the ring of tents.

Finally she asked, “What night is it, _Tar’len_?” And she twisted her voice up, coy.

“It is the third night,” he said.

How the red raised under her cheeks. How her nipples shaped under the fabric of her nightclothes. How she caressed the nail of her thumb up and down her pointer finger. He categorized these signatures of her desire.

“And, _Tar’len_ , what was it you said…?”

“Six strikes, _ma’haurasha_. Did you understand my meaning?”

She tried to hide her shudder from him. She squared her shoulders as she adjusted her seat and the wooden wheels groaned. He brought one hand around and soothed his fingers on her ear, across her cheek, and down her chin. After a moment, when she did not answer, he tilted his head and opened his mouth, and she rushed to speak before him.

“Yes, I understood.” She turned her head and gently bit the notch of his wrist.

He tapped her throat and she released him.

“We do not speak that way, vhenan,” he had murmured, enunciating each word as he’d brought his lips to her ear. And then he had delivered the promise. Three nights. Six strikes.

And the past three days of travel had been a growing madness between them - the distance he kept from her just as cruel as the punishment promised. Her tension had made her angry, at first. She’d held it like a cyclone in battle. Avoided standing near him. Would not meet his eyes.

Then on the second day, her anticipation urged her near him. He had enjoyed this but had dismissed her even so. She had plied him with rash obscenities. Tried to draw his touch, his attention - most likely, his ire. _“Slam your length through me; come in me so hard I forget my own name.” “Won’t you spread your spend between my breasts?” “Fill me with root and make me walk beside you, wet and throbbing for release.”_

He could admit that there had been… temptation. Even now, he felt his heart beat faster recalling the lull of her voice, the way she’d dipped her body in such subtle and enticing ways when she knew he chanced to look her way. And had it not been only when she had slunk onto his lap, as he sat sharpening the blade of his staff, that he had put an end to the behavior? Had needed to put an end to it, before he lost control. Abstaining from her with icy and distant amusement, her cockiness had been replaced with frustration, then wanton pleading, until she had gone from him entirely.

Then all today, she had been consumed by whip-thin anxiety.

When she had finally looked close to snapping - foot tapping, knee bouncing, fingers steepled together and pressed to her lips as she stared mindlessly at the bonfire flames - Solas had decided to offer her some small release. His hand, for her to take. She had submitted and followed at once. She had walked behind him silently into the dark, fingers tight around his. She had allowed him to lift her onto the edge of the wagon and had welcomed his kiss, his embrace, with a desperate, grateful whine.

“Undress.” He said, softly.

Pangara took care with each button. Edged the nightcoat from her shoulders. Her breasts perked in the cool night, veilfire shadows moving on their curves. “May I stand?” She asked, and after receiving his permission she elected to remove her breeches by first turning so that her backside faced him.

“Bend,” he instructed, unable to keep a note of anticipation from his tone.

He saw the clenching of her fists, and after all the ways in which she had vexed him - for she _had_ vexed him, more than he’d wanted to allow himself to acknowledge - he did not have the patience for this fight.

He closed the distance between them and gripped the back of her neck. “Bend,” he said again, calmly guiding her down. Her strength resisted him. Yet he prevailed on her to adopt the requested pose, and after he stepped back and appreciated the curve of her, he turned away, saying as he lifted the cane from the wagonbed, “Repetition. Seven.” He heard her curse under her breath and was glad she could not see the quirk of his lips.

She indulged him in what he desired so greatly: move her, control her, make demands of her he might - her spirit would fight. Would resist and thrash against the collar.

But what he did for her now was an extension of the agreements they had made. She waited for him, bent over, her eyes drifting closed as she fell into a space where she knew he would carry her.

“Your pain will not bring me satisfaction, _ma’haurasha_ ,” he said. “I regret the necessity.”

He studied the length of witherstalk he’d chosen that morning. He had stripped it and left to dry in the midday heat. It was still fresh enough to be supple, but would carry good resistance through the rod.

Some things and never changing. The uses of witherstalk among them.

He walked alongside her. Examined her stance. He watched her shiver when he ghosted a touch down her spine - watched her lean and moan as he gently pinched and rubbed the curve of her ass. Then he reached and placed the cane under her lips.

And, when he glanced over to see her throwing a look back at him that was every part lust and defiance, he casually dipped his fingers between the folds of her cleft tucked up so nicely by her bend. Her indignation fell away; she tried to rock back against his fingers - but he kept them poised at her entrance, and the cane under her lips.

She shivered.

She pressed her mouth to the witherstalk.

He pushed the wood up between her lips.

She accepted the cane between her teeth with a tremble that made her whole body contract and writhe.

Solas snapped his fingers. Her gaze shot back to him, her eyes hot with humiliation. And he maintained eye contact - forced her to watch him roll up the sleeve of the arm poised over her cunt. He twitched his fingers and smiled gently as she responded with a whimper. Then, just as the flush in her cheeks started to spread down to her neck, he pulled his hand away.

She protested, wanton pleas muffled by the cane clamped in her jaw.

He took the gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on - the left, then the right - with care.

Her knees bent, moving more of her weight onto her arms. The Anchor cast its small, eery light from beneath her palm. She did not look away. Still twisted with her chin resting over her shoulder, the cane wide out of either side of her mouth, bent at the waist, she was a woman of exquisitely broken symmetries. He wanted to plunge within her. The tension in the space that separated their bodies was heavy with delay, temptation. The phantom light revealed the way her pupils dilated. How her eyes tracked his fingers as he made fastidious adjustments to his gloves.

He extended a hand and gestured for the cane.

She dipped her head and dropped the length into his palm.

And then he was tapping the rod upon her backside, once, twice, and then widening his stance and torquing his shoulder back and then, over the whistle-crack of stalk against her ass, instructing her: “Count.”

“One,” she gasped.

Two. Three.

He disappeared into the lissome blow of the wood upon her flesh, each calculated sink a song in the night.

“Four,” with a moan.

“Breathe,” he reminded her.

Five.

He paused. Allowed the vicious tongues of pain to buzz beneath her skin.

“How many remain, vhenan?”

The way she fought to think, to respond beyond the simple task of making the count of blows, told him that her mind had plummeted to its depths. Her tongue sounding too-large, she said finally, “Two.”

“And it would be one more, only.”

“I made you repeat yourself,” she groaned, and when she shifted her hips back as if to beg for further ministrations, he felt the weakness of his own desire gripping warm and harmful in his gut.

“Breathe,” he said again, refusing to adjust himself. His erection pressed at an uncomfortable angle to his thigh, and it was… suddenly more difficult to silence his thoughts as he prepared to finish the caning. But he mastered his control as she breathed out. And his whole body spun into the blow. And he jerked into the clarity of mind which let him see and judge and place the hit. And the hit was good, and she made a small, longing noise.

Six.

He paused again before the final blow.

Caressing her reddened flesh, he savored this ease, this strength within him - fully attuned to her need, the singular purpose of the power she afforded him resonated in his spirit. He was freed from the familiar weights of guilt and uncertainty as surely as if he stood within the Fade.

She released him.

“Seven.” Her voice was thick, her wetness dewing on her thigh.

He tossed the cane into the night. He stroked her ass, patting it gently, then moved his hand up her spine and rubbed over her shoulders. He hovered first one hand, then the other under her chin. She pulled his gloves off with her teeth and when he’d tucked them away he straightened her posture. He turned her and held her close to his chest.

Pulling the embrace close, and closer still, they clung to one another.

And then she pulled away.

Her touch fluttered against the stiffness still constrained along his thigh. She adjusted him, gently, through his breeches, and he struggled to hide his relief. She snickered as she buried her head against his chest, and with the syrupy laze of satisfaction drifting between them, she repeated in whispers all the appeals she’d made of him before. And then she murmured new challenges, each more obscene than the last, that in short time had him grappling against her and closing his mouth over hers, and stripping, impatiently, out of everything that separated them.


	6. the world goes together

**Prompt: City: “I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling.”**

\--

The Dread Wolf wonders, _what is death?_

The sounds are like rain-patter, the little songs that the woman in the next bed is making. She repeats floods of “dae dae dae” and “ve ve ve” “-laaan,” no longer words but curious noises of language that once sat comfortably on her tongue. And from this thing that he has given her: a new language has been born. A language that belongs to these bodies like clouds - all wrinkles, all palings, all shifting features.

It is her wife in the next bed. The Dread Wolf holds Bayla’s hand, and even in this dream, his agent conjures this vision of her wife in her final season. It is always strange for him to find death in the Fade. The song of death was all but unknown to him before the need for restoration grew too great. Now, memories of death are here in their dreamings - so many of the mages who shape the spirits of the Fade around their memories.

So many of them are allowed to die in their sleep.

But it is rare for his agents. For those who still seek to shape the image of freedom onto the unchanging realm.

His oldest agent is dying in her sleep, and he is holding her hand at the turn of some tumultuous century, and she will give him one final report before she passes.

But that is not why he has come.

She is tired. He can tell. A grandmother is dying in her sleep, and she wants to imagine her death as if she could die beside her wife; her wife whom she can only conjure, even now, in the long sickness that took first her mind, then her body, and eventually her spirit.

Bayla dreams that she sleeps. And she dreams that her wife speaks in a babble of watery half-sounds.

The Dread Wolf brightens the light, just a little. It could be like a cloud rolling away from the sun behind the window. There is only a single window, with hyacinths in a purple pot.

Of course there is no sun, and no window. No hyacinths, but only the impressions of these things in this realm of the spirit of Fulfillment he has guided to her across the Fade.

Such a rare spirit, Fulfillment. But when he spoke to it softly of all she had done, all her many accomplishments, the spirit had agreed.

It had agreed to shape the Fade around her last memories; to comfort her in her final hour. To fill her final dream with the feelings of praise, finality, and peace that comprised its purpose.

A weak laugh from the woman in the next bed surprises him. The Dread Wolf smiles without thinking, mirroring the sound of quiet joy.

It is easier to think of the woman in the other bed, and of not the woman sleeping quietly in this one.

Bayla is not quiet as she dreams of sleeping - this, her final dream. She was never quiet. Her dreaming had shouted for him across the Fade, all those years ago. For justice. For pride. For a way to punish the world.

He had come to her with wisdom, and she had listened.

She had raised soldiers for the people’s cause. She had maneuvered supplies and intelligence through the cities, through the high houses. She had recruited, first for the sake of one name, and then for the sake of another - but always, always, with the words of power on her lips. _“Rise. Revolt.”_

And when she had grown too powerful alone, she had accepted his caution. He had been able to retire her peacefully, safely. Protecting both the cells she had organized and her own life, in the end.

His thumb drifts across the back of her hand. He is remote, remembering.

He has so much to remember, he who Walks and has had so much time to make so many choices.

She dreams that she wakes.

She is not surprised to see him here, holding her hand.

He thinks, I need to be strong now, and so he gives her a small smile, a small bow.

She does not smile. She raises her chin, returns a stately nod. She has always dreamed her body exactly as, he imagines, it must appear in the unchanging realm. Her hair has grayed. Her neck sways when she looks over at the other bed. Her face collapses into wavering wrinkles when she says, “Oh,” with a small, sad smile.

There is a pot of ointment by the bedside. It was not there when she dreamt she slept. He looks to her, questioning, and she nods. He takes a cream into his palms and spreads it, warms it, and it makes slick noises of eggs sloshing in a bowl.

He places his hands on her left wrist and pushes gently up her arm. He spreads the ointment and is very gentle at first; then, hesitantly, when he realizes she will not break under his touch, he moves with greater purpose and assurance. Her skin shifts beneath his fingers. It is loose. It ripples like the top of a river. He asks, “Are you comfortable?” Because even though he is very familiar with silence, and with this silence, above all others, because when faced with death he has always been at a loss for what to say - even so, Bayla has never been a woman comfortable with silence.

She laughs softly. It is a long time before she says, “Yes, ma fen. It is very nice - it is soothing.”

“Good. That is my intention.” His eyes flick up to her face and he realizes that he has been training his eyes, too intently, on her hand. On her wrist, swollen like an apple. Bruises pellet her forearm, pink and maroon and other shades that make him fear he injures her with every touch.

“Am I hurting you?”

She looks at him. Then, after a nervous squinting of her eyes where she realizes that he has asked her something, she makes a non-committal, “Hm?”

“Am I hurting you?” He repeats, louder, kinder.

“Oh, no,” she says, “Not at all.”

He can only respond with a smile that is not like he is already mourning her. He is not. He is composed.

It is good to feel her hand, like the underside an autumn leaf. It is good to hold her knuckles - still elegant, still delicate, though they are now hard like pebbles. It is good to hear her breathing - though each breath is an open-mouth rasp, and when he looks at her face he realizes that, if he un-focuses his eyes and looks past her, he can lose what makes her face different from any other one of their faces, when this thing he has given to them brings them to their final dream.

“What have you been thinking about?” He asks, too quietly, and must repeat the question.

Her eyebrows tilt together and she leans back, her mouth open, and says, “Oh.”

After a while, he suspects she does not want to speak of this with him. He fills his hands with the ointment once again. The smell is a thing she has made a memory of in the Fade. It is herbal. It is floral. His hands are coated; they cannot absorb any more. The ointment sticks and cracks white and cobwebby in the lines of his hands. It is like paint, he thinks absently. He moves around the bed to her other arm. He caresses the ointment into her elbow. Into the looseness of her muscle underneath her forearm. He carefully covers her wrist.

“Just… my life, my battles,” she says at last.

Her privacy has always been impenetrable to him. He does not know the name of the woman in the next bed. He has respected her too much to ask.

But now it seems the invitation has been made. He filters through the thousand questions racing in his thoughts.

“Were you thinking of your marriage?”

She does not answer. The woman in the other bed has sunk into a peaceful, quiet snoring.

And then she says, “Oh, no. My time at the library.”

He bows his head.

“Did you know, when you sent me there?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, honestly, because she deserves this truth in the end.

“Ah,” she breathes. And she shifts her weight in the bed, and the sheets where the outline of her legs should be pull and wrinkle. “Ah, ma fen. You only bit once, after all. I should have listened to ma vhenan.”

He cannot answer her, for nothing she says is untrue.

He reaches out with the power he holds over this dreaming. He touches lightly within her mind, discovers what he is looking for.

Bayla’s wife sits up in the next bed, and she is young, and her black hair is braided, and her eyes are clear and she says to the Dread Wolf, sadly, “You don’t know much, old soldier, do you?” And part of him that he thought could not hurt, is hurt by this even so.

But she stands up all the same, pushing the covers off of her young legs and padding softly across the space between the beds, and the Dread Wolf moves away so that Bayla’s wife can grasp her dying wife’s hand.

“Ma vhenan,” Bayla says, and because it is her dream, her voice does not croak or catch.

“Hush,” says her wife, smoothing the gray hair from her brow.

He leaves, then, because it is right that he go. He leaves them as they kiss, he leaves them as they cling, he leaves them because it is right that he walk away from the two beds, and the spirit of Fulfillment shapes the realm behind him, and he hears it hum its song. He goes out onto the paths, and the song of the spirit follows him for a long, long way:

_This is what is real. This is what was. This was everything, and it was good; and it was good, and it was enough._

_It was enough._

_It was enough._


	7. light from sleep

**Prompt: Rotunda: “Lightly, lightly from my sleep / She stole, our vows of dew to break / Upon a day of melting rain / Another love to take: (Song, Steven Spender)**

\--

When Solas woke from sleep with a wide smear of ink drying on his cheek, Pangara took the cloth and dabbed the pinched cotton to her tongue.

She did it slowly. And she twisted the cloth so that her mouth puckered, and the groggy look he gave her could not carry enough of the weight of warning in it to make her stop.

There were many voices chattering in the rotunda above them.

She was clearly wild with something. Drink or leaf or just the pent-up frustration of too many days spent on the throne in the other room, he could not say. His dreams had been hazy ones; full of terror, full of longings. He felt addled. He needed more sleep. But he must complete this research. He wanted to amuse her, wanted to work her until she was a sweaty heap under his hand, sated and stinging and full of him.

But he was tired.

Solas moderated his desire. Judged her mood. Pangara stroked his chin and pressed her breasts up and out with her elbows as she bent to clean the ink from his face. He had lived too long to be embarrassed by falling asleep on his quill. Yet her harlot’s tricks - the little ways she enjoyed drawing his lust and commanding his gaze - at least here, where his weakness for her would certainly be noted by the spying eyes above: this agitated him. He had his dignity. Not, it seemed, when it came to her - but he needed it, nonetheless.

Because he adored her, his smile was too gentle. He said, “That is enough, vhenan,” and stroked her wrist, laying a kiss on her pulse.

It only incensed her.

She knew exactly what he dismissed.

He’d underestimated her.

She straddled him slowly. Deliberately. Her eyes were almost bored, her expression unflappable, her mouth open and red in a way that made him see cherries, strawberries, apples and wine. She leaned forward so that her heat angled down on his lap, and what had roused her while he slept? He felt a spray of shameful jealousy, quelled it. She was a woman. She was a woman of appetite and she’d chosen him, and she chose him now again and again.

Why? Why him? He had wondered it a thousand times; he had wondered it when she’d first placed her hand on his cheek, turning his head to hers in the Fade; he’d wondered, _“I?”_ And it had almost been pathetic, the surprise of it. But then she’d made it all inevitable, hadn’t she. And now she rubbed her heat on his lap and the voices went a little quieter above them and he growled at her, his tone something he tried to control; he failed. “That is enough,” he said, in a way that only served to make her sneer, aggression for aggression: an even exchange.

Yet evenness was not her aim. And he needed her to stop doing this to him, to stop being this for him here, under so many eyes. And so he did as she aimed. He lunged out and snatched the hand that held the cloth. He twisted her arm behind her back. Her eyes locked to his. He looked behind her, beyond her. Checked the height, and then shoved his other hand against her chest. Her balance was not good and he judged aright. She fell from his lap and her head cleared the edge of the desk and she fell under, and he was bent in his chair, holding her under the thick slab of wood, holding her immobile in the darkness.

She looked up at him with respect, now, at least, glowing inside her victory and humor.

“Enough,” he said, firmly, and when she said nothing he hitched her arm up higher behind her back.

She nodded, grinned, and her eyes gleamed as they caught the light of veilfire in the dark.

He released her and sat back, making his breathing even. How she could pull this from him even now, exhausted after three… no, four days of intent study, no sleep - and of course he had so little need for food - unraveling what magicks worked within the Tranquil skulls. How could she do this. It alarmed him. He hungered for her - for what roiled between them; it was unwise to be this way in public. Why she goaded him, he could not say. Solas glanced up at the balconies of the rotunda. A cowled head pulled back over the banister. He breathed out, slowly.

When he had collected himself enough to face her once more, he pulled his chair forward, blocking her in.

“Chanter’s Bend,” he said. And he heard her shift beneath the desk, and when he raised his feet she sidled beneath them, and supported him as a footrest.

“If you are so intent on being near,” he murmured, “then near is where you will stay.”

He should have expected the hand on the inside of his leg.

He had kept her under the desk for hours. He thought that she might have slept; which would have been good for her - too often she worked herself without proper sleep. The Chanter’s Bend was a meditative pose, knees tucked and arms outstretched, head relaxed on the floor. His feet could rest gently at the base of her spine while the natural strength of her body supported him, and she was free to drift into dreams. He was also pleased by how alert her presence made him. Just knowing that she was in his care beneath the desk was invigorating. He must stay awake to be mindful of her, to listen for her calling their phrase, or to tend to her if it sounded as if she suffered. He had been able to scratch a number of breakthroughs into the vellum while she lay at his feet.

And now he paused in his work and looked down, and saw her hand just above his knee.

“Yes?” He asked, soft, still mindful of the many people who shuffled and laughed and turned pages above them.

“May I sit up, _Tar’len?”_

“You may.” He dipped his quill and bent his knees, raising his feet for her to move out from under him. He shifted forward in his chair and leaned thoughtfully over this most recent equation, which might be able to finally explain the veering of the Veil around the eyesockets of the skulls, which appeared to project, through a lingering Necromancy casting, no doubt, a pentatonic hum which -

Her head rested on his knee.

He looked down, gently curious, and met her eyes. His heart betrayed him with soft patterings of tenderness. Her eyes were the kind of green he did not want to tell her reminded him of long-dead forests. Of certain stars which fled into day with emerald light. It was unkind to write poems to her eyes. It was another of his guilts, that he could not help but whisper these poems to her in dark, even though it would be kinder to always be cruel - even as she wriggled, even as she laughed, even as she covered his mouth with her own to make him stop.

“May I tend your feet, _Tar’len?”_ She asked.

He hesitated. His eyes flicked up.

Yet, none could see her, surely.

“Yes, vhenan. You may.” She slid first his left wrapping from his calf, and then his right, and the contented sigh he heard as she bent to her task filled him with comfort. This feeling was like a warm fire at the end of a long day. He couldn’t help the way his eyes closed as she massaged his calves, rolled his ankles and pressed the points of his feet. For their kind who walked the ways, this had always been a gentle gift. And from her, he treasured it.

And so he was vulnerable to the way she worked up his legs, first one, and then the other.

And he was still pretending to himself that he was focused on his work when she grasped at either side of his breeches and whispered, “Solas?”

And he could not say it, he _could not_ \- and so because he was weak, and because when he glanced up, desperately, reminding himself he was too old to feel any shame about this sort of thing, and he saw no one looking down at him - he only nodded, fervently, wordlessly. Quick, before any sense could stop him.

And she took him out of his breeches and he righted the tome on his desk, scooting forward in his chair, burying his head in the book as he brought it to rest on his chest.

And she made a row of plush kisses up one side of his cock, and then up the other. And he felt every touch as vibrantly as if it were the first. And this was when he grunted, and she paused for a minute and he swore he heard her make a snerking cough, but it was her tongue next that rippled warm over him, and she’d pulled his breeches down lower, and his chair was far enough under the desk that he could lean back, the tome in hand, and be… hopefully mostly? Entirely? Concealed.

He was not expecting her to…

Well.

He moaned, which was likely a surprise for both of them.

_“Vhenan,”_ he hissed, and she made a noise that said, “That wasn’t me, that was you,” which was infuriating but also so _good_ because then she did it again.

And she spread him, to do this, which - while, no, it wasn’t as if he had never before - but for _her_ to, and… and he was unbathed, and she…

She pushed against, and then into, him with a wanting, hearty groan that made him smash the back of his wrist against his mouth, simultaneously scandalized and rod-hard, moist beads dripping from the tip of his trembling cock. His testes rode on her forehead. This was not what he had thought she intended, not something that he had ever asked for or thought to mention to her.

And so, that she knew… that she _knew_ …

He tried, desperately, to deny the feeling of arousal which slammed through him - not necessarily from the sensation of her licking and tonguing against him - which was, on its own, perfectly acceptable - but from the intimacy of her wanting this from him, and the filth of it, and the beauty of her so intent and enthusiastic on her desire. The pleasure of this rocked through him. And then she stroked his cock with her hand, and he felt a sloshing heat in his gut, and he was leaning back embarrassingly far in his chair to be even more in her mercy, and the back of his head pressed into the upholstery, and his knees strained against the fabric pooled around them.

And still he held the book propped on his chest. And his hips and lower abdomen were firmly hidden under the desk, so that he could only swallow and look quickly to the tome when he saw someone on the second balcony glance down. He would not groan as she gripped him with a firm, squelching stroke (she must have spat in her hand - or… or could it be her wetness, cupped up from between her thighs…? He made a muffled, choked sound, and hid it in a cough).

She did not stop pressing, her tongue warm and rough within him. Her hand did not have to work long before he was breathing short and harsh and at the edge, his face and ears red and burning from carefully maintained silence. She was not silent, though. She could not be curbed. She whined in the back of her throat, and moaned, and grunted soft and appreciative under the desk; and it could not be enough, it could never be enough, this cresting phenomenon she orchestrated within him. And on the first level of the rotunda there was now a peculiar quiet that galled him, and part of him wanted to grab down at her - one touch, one _word_ from him and she would stop, he knew. After she had brought him to this, she would give it entirely over to him to make her cease, to protect his dignity.

And that he did not stop her was entirely her triumph. That he let her, with a series, finally, of grunts he could not withhold, bring him to completion there in the busy rotunda, with the smoke and scent of many candles burning and people chattering and moving above them. He muffled his groaning into his arm. His erection throbbed as his rectum tightened. He came onto the fabric of his sweater and over her fingers, watching this avidly; he could no longer spare a glance up to see if any saw. He watched himself, instead, spill over her hand under the desk, helplessly absorbed. Debauched fascination. The book clutched flat to his chest. And when she pulled her face away from him and gave him a smile in the dark that was pure joy and self-satisfied contentment, he was too weak in the knees and, suddenly, too tired to reprimand her.

He only shook his head, and gingerly pulled his breeches up and made himself presentable. He set the book on top of his notes. He pushed back from the desk and stood, and took her beaded hand in his. He found the ink-stained cloth and wiped her fingers, her palm. He helped her stand from under the desk. He guided her across the quiet tower and out through the door to the great hall. And after four days, she distracted him from his studies at last. He accompanied her to her quarters, and he said, stumbling on the first stair, “You could have asked.” 

And she said, “I did ask. Yesterday, and the day before, and even this morning, and I know you don’t remember.” And he could no longer deny his exhaustion, and she was insufferable in her delight.


	8. writing wants flesh

**Prompt: Writing wants, must have, must know, / is flesh, blood, and bone, / proof we are not made to be alone. (The Thing Written, Stanley Moss)**

\--

“How can they not expect my _animosity?”_ She spat, rolling away from him and clutching her arms around her like a feral creature priming for the pounce.

Solas tried to keep from looking as stunned as he felt. Her change in demeanor had been abrupt - he had spoken the suggestion gently, meaning only to help prepare her for the meeting with the Northern Orlesian countrymen the following morning.

He frowned, opened his mouth to speak, and then reconsidered. Instead, he got his legs under him and stood to go.

“Your anger is reasonable,” he admitted, if with just a hint of reprobation.

And it was his surrender that prevailed upon her.

“Only… No, only… they’d be fools to expect anything else, wouldn’t they?” Pangara’s tone turned, now strangely pleading - an unusual desperation in it. “Josie has said we’re hardly more than myth to them. She told me some of them even speak as though we’re some long-dead people - a people they obliterated on the plains of Halamshiral.”

He should leave her with her righteous anger and with her convictions.

But had he ever been a man with that discretion?

“Think of what you represent, lethallin. Think of your position.” He needn’t remind her - nothing but her position had been consuming her for weeks, and he saw how the edges of it had already started to eat away at the parts of her that she called ‘herself.’ He had seen her disappearing. He’d fretted over what he had done to her, to her spirit, by giving her this burden.

She sneered and looked away from him. Taking up the poker - an iron rod topped with the roaring head of a griffon, some artifact of a long-gone age - she tended the fire with ferocious energy. The doors to the balcony were open. The fire complained; it sparked to be mussed and adjusted, the thick scent of pine burning off the bark. He paced to the desk and the bookshelves fat and dusty with their tomes, thinking of how _young_ she was.

He thought of himself, and of the fireplace in this chamber roaring under a blast of his magic - furious, grieving - in an age the dust of which had long been consumed by blood-hungry stars.

Skyhold had survived worse tempers, he thought, wryly, as she flung the iron against the side of the fireplace. It was an unusual performance of pique. The iron clanged and clattered to the stone floor.

He heard her release a slow, intentional breath.

“I’m sorry if that startled you,” she said. And then she groaned, crouching back on her heels.

He picked a volume from the top shelf. “Better to get it out of your system now, undoubtedly.” He smiled softly when she shook her head, and he flipped through the pages. This volume had been added at some point in his centuries of sleep. He did not recognize it. “I know you are skilled at withholding your emotions. I had only mentioned it as a matter of good counsel. That you feel comfortable showing your frustration…” He shrugged. “As long as the poker does not come flying over here to crack me open.”

She gave a pained laugh. “It was childish.” And then she looked at the book in his hand, and looked away.

He brought it back over to where she held her knees against her chest, rolling her weight back and forth from her toes to her heels. He sat in the chair behind her, perched on the edge of the goatskin seat, leaning forward and pressing his toes into the warm fur of the rug.

“Are you familiar with the work?” He asked.

She shook her head, shrugged.

“Ah. This appears to be poetry. Exalted Age, if my conversations with Varric lend me any expertise on the subject. The obsession with shape verse serves as some clue. Although, the form’s popularity continued into the Steel Age. Remarkable condition. See, here, this one is shaped as a tower.”

She shifted closer to him, eyes scanning the whole of the page before she nodded.

“And this,” he continued, turning the page, “I believe is meant to make the shape of a bonfire. This tome is quite curious.”

“They aren’t good pictures,” she noted, and by her tone he knew her nervousness at being confronted in this way.

“This work is by one that the regime at the time would have called maleficarum. In the Fade, I have watched the monstrous burning times: an empress wild with her rule, whose pining brought her brother to her bedroom. I’ve seen the spirits reenact the horrors of those smoke-fogged nights, when mage-mothers would sheath their mouths with cotton. That this work survived? And that it lives here? It is most remarkable.”

She smiled at him oddly. “I’ve told Dorian he can take all these to the rotunda if he wants.”

Their eyes met. He held the book and everything he’d denied her - tried to tell himself it was the Dalish, it was the Orlesians, it was the years of slavery under Tevinter that had taken this from her. And in the cities of Elvhenan, in those places of learning, had not reading been considered tedious when an easy lock of memories could be imbued within the flattened timber just as well?

But he had taken this from her. For all her learning, for all she carried fierce within her - she did not have this. Or, what she had of it was piecemeal and insufficient, and he had heard her crying - the sounds ugly and panicked - in private after the Commander had first asked for her reports. He had written them for her. It had been a silent agreement under the pretense, at first, of knowing how little time she had to bother with such trifles. He had slipped them beneath her door to pass on. He’d adopted a rougher hand to mimic her; he had hoped that the choice would not offend.

They’d never spoken of it.

And now there was so little pretense left between them.

A danger in itself.

The light of the fire was golden; the wintry night broken by this memory of summer, fluttering a heat into the chamber that was part fire, part her closeness at his knee.

“Why don’t you just read it to me,” she sighed, finally.

“If I might speak the words with you,” he said, carefully, “would you be opposed?”

Pangara put her hands over his hands and looked down at the book. A twist of sore rage he caught in her eyes and then… a thing he had not wanted to, had not meant to, elicit. Defeat.

“If this is what will make you stay tonight.” She lowered her lips to the insides of his wrists. She pressed a kiss to right and left - and his whole body plummeted into chills and shuddering yearning. As he quelled these palpitations, she eased herself up and onto his lap, taking the book from his loose grip and raising it to her gaze. She frowned at the first stanza. “Protect the flame…”

“Incendiary.”

“Incendiary, which remembers my fair Lad and Son. A…”

“A pyre. The spelling is archaic - ”

“Pyre of the souls. A pyre of the souls crown-reaching…”

The night ended with them both laid out on the pelt in front of the fireplace. She practiced the shapes of letters on his back and he guessed at each. Her touch flickered against him again, and again - and she spelled his name, and her name, and her clan’s name, and the names of everyone they knew and everywhere they’d been on his body. And sometimes he pretended to not know: “S-E-R…. The title of a noble knight, perhaps?” And she snorted and then spelled names he’d never heard before. And that was how she introduced him to her family, really - letters traced against his back, her loved ones pressing on his shoulders.


	9. the retreat

**Prompt: Sea: “Standing next to my old friend I sense that his soldiers have retreated” (Government, Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time), and a request for a walk in the Fade**

\--

“Do you want yellow or do you want blue?”

“Tell me which you planned to use,” he said.

“Yellow.”

“Then I will have yellow.”

Solas raised his arm exactly as she showed him.

She stood on her toes and held one end of the thin strip of fabric to the inside of his armpit. She let the other end dangle to the ground; when it did not touch his hip, her face scrunched into an expression of exaggerated rage.

“You’re too long,” she complained, and he laughed.

“My mother used to tell me that.”

He was sitting. The rocks on the beach were peculiar: black and red, neither too heavy to hold nor throw. He dropped the arm she was not measuring and lifted a red rock. He smoothed his fingers over its puckered, cratered shell. He made a fist and squeezed - for all it felt like it might crumble, the stone was solid in his palm.

“Is this pumice?” He asked himself, but she looked over and lunged to grab it from him. Solas snatched his grasp up, just out of her reach, and his other hand closed to point one cautioning finger in front of her nose. “Ah.” He said.

She rocked back and at first her eyes narrowed and she looked as though she might snarl. But, as he slowly raised a brow and tilted his head, she moderated. Something that might, if she were older, look like shame flashed across her face. Then she broke into a wide and half-toothy smile.

He could never help but smile back.

“What do we say?” He prompted.

“May I please have what you have?”

He chuckled and dropped the rock into her two hands, cupped tight together.

“What interests you about that rock in particular, da’len?”

She did not answer and it was as good as her failing to hear him, although he imagined the question merely bored her.

He looked away from her and around at the endless beach. Black and red rocks as far as he could see down the left shore, and again - a flat expanse to the right. And in front of them, the sea.

He lifted and opened his arms wider side-to-side. He entreated, softly, “May I be measured for my new coat tomorrow, ma da’vhenan?”

She turned the rock over and then held it in one hand. She had no interest in curling into his hold, of allowing him to cradle her and tuck loose strands back in her braids; she had a singular interest. She crouched, picked up the tailor’s cloth again, and went back to draping the length beside his torso, clumsy now with the the treasure she would not relinquish. It seemed to him that her small fingers should not be able to hold anything - seemed to him that she should fumble everything she tried to grasp - her hands should be too little to keep the things she carries.

“You were absent all day,” called a voice behind him.

He looked around with something like guilt and heard the rock clatter as it rejoined the mosaic of the shore. The sky was dark as ever and he saw her outline, stepping towards him through the ever-present roil of smoke. He dropped his arms.

The pup scampered from his side, a streak of gray fur kicking up rocks as it bolted towards the sea. It entered the spray and disappeared. When Pangara stepped close to him, he wondered if she’d seen. Tucking her knees to one side and her hair grimy with wind and ash and dust, she sat beside him and leaned against his shoulder.

“I didn’t know where I might find you. But I walked as you showed me. And my ‘pure intent’ brought me here.” She smirked up at him, and his heart clenched, and he wanted, badly, to kiss her.

A spray raked up from the sea and shuffled the beach, rocks shivering and turning over like the ground could breathe.

“Did you meet with any spirits, on the paths?”

“Only one.” She looked at him sideways and then did not say more, and he did not press, leaning forward stooped and timid, clasping his hands tight together.

They lapsed into silence.

They listened to the sea.

“I call her Viratisha. It’s too much name, I know. I… I call her Attie,” she admitted, softly. He pressed his eyes tightly shut. He cried in silence while she held him.

And behind him the mountains burst with another cough of fire; the Fade’s green light flashed on the horizon. She held him amidst all he had wrought, her bare knees bitten by the rocks - scoria that would one day grind to fine, red sand and wash out with the tide - and they listened to the sea and the distant songs of spirits touching down upon the earth, and they grieved.


	10. drums

She has bitten the nail down to the nub again, and when he notices he reaches out and holds her hand. She bites her lip, instead, and looks away from him back at the oven. He puts the ragged fingernail to his mouth - places a kiss. This slight touch harmonizes his whole being; the closeness he can share with her, he hears it when he sleeps. He hears it when he wakes. He hears it like his own pulse, chanting, drumming: _her, her, her._

“It’s not rising,” she says again.

He checks to where they watch Orlesian pan sweetbread bake in the little stone skillet.

“Give it time.”

This soothes her. She takes it as a command, however softly made, and her shoulders relax.

‘Give it time’ is a new phrase he has learned. As if the movement of her life to its end point is something she can gift away. As if the duration of a moment can be allotted, and received. Taken by something else. She _gives her time_ to the little stone skillet, to the sun going down through the door, and to the fire beading sweat on both of their necks.

Every new dawn he feels like he is begging: _give it time._

She starts to fidget again. He presses another kiss to her knuckles, and goes back to reading the book propped on his knee. He keeps her fingers in his, resting on the next page.

He would simply say, _“Patience,”_ but he has discovered that, in certain moods, this only infuriates her.

“Can you tell me more about the demons we last fought, coming up through the Emprise?”

He pauses in his reading and strokes his thumb, distracted, over hers. “There were four. A demon of Despair. Pride, as you no doubt remember. And two of Rage.”

“The Despair demon. You said once that Cole might once have been vulnerable to corruption into a Despair demon? But isn’t Cole a demon already - and he’s still Compassion. And yet, he kills.”

“Cole…” He feels his lips draw tight, and measures all he can and cannot say. “Is a demon by our definition of the term, and he is a spirit. Cole, if made to act against his purpose as Compassion, would have once perhaps found himself twisted into Despair. The intent of Cole’s action when he takes a life - this is Compassion.”

“I’m not saying I’ve never witnessed mercy killings. But…”

“I caution you, vhenan, to be careful how you think of him when he is near. It is unknown the extent to which Cole may yet be influenced by our perceptions of him.”

Pangara looks at him, curious. “Is he here now?”

Solas hesitates, touching out against the Veil to see if the particular lyricism of Cole’s presence vibrates within the room. “I do not sense Cole in this room now,” he says, “but that is not to say he did not visit us recently. Perhaps that is what brought you to this question.”

She reaches up and strokes the garlic suspended over the table where they sit. “Compassion. Cole kills for the greater good. Murders. He would kill hundreds, if I asked him to.” She notes the alarm in his glance and mollifies, “Not something I intend to do. But… what if I mess up? Would Cole - would he… change, on his own?”

“Ah. You are asking if atrocities can be committed in Compassion’s name. Certainly not. Cole kills the killers. He is a pacifying force, and acts only out of necessity.” He tilts the book mostly closed, keeping his place with a finger. “Atrocity is the product of intentional ill-will, of hatred. Unchecked rage or, too often, greed and self-interest. That is not who you are.” She nods, and he muses further. “A person who convinced others that compassion is the wellspring of their cruelty would be a fool at best, and a monster at worst.”

At that she looks at him sidelong and pointedly raises a brow.

“Solas.”

“Ah,” he stammers, “But not - to be certain, ah, for you I feel -” the flush of heat to his face feels peculiar and uncalled-for, “in that particular case - whatever we may…” And when he sees the way her lips curl up with glee, he reopens his volume and, intent on the next paragraph, says sternly, “Check the sweetbread.”

She leans over and kisses his cheek before she goes.

“It’s not rising,” she reports over her shoulder, miserably.

“Mm.” He grunts and raises the book, trying to parse if this glyph contains a scribe’s error, or if there really is a rune application for ‘rowing of boats’ in this fire casting.

She is brushing her fingers over the herbs bundled on the shelves when she asks, “Why does Cole keep to himself so much?”

“It is dangerous for Cole to remain around so many mortal influences.” He licks his thumb and turns the page. “Passions run hot. Not everyone is equipped with the tools to interact safely with him as a spirit. The forgetting is good, in that sense. It keeps him protected from further interest, and meddling.”

“You don’t forget him, do you.” She says it softly, and it is not a question. This is better; he does not feel obliged to make an answer and he pretends he has not heard, flipping to the back of the volume to check a reference and then returning to his place. A new style; he prefers the notes when they are copied beneath the body of the text.

Pangara saunters to the kitchen door and watches the light change; she fans herself and lifts the back of her hair to let off the heat. He watches her out of the corner of his eye. They are quiet together in a communion of passing daylight, a golden light suffusing the warm bricks of the kitchen and the heavy wood of the table. The sounds of fowl honking south came to them across clouds like ribs over the world. The sounds of nobles lingering after the evening’s feast chattering through the walls and a few flies have already found the little pile of dishes scattered with the remainders of crow, hog, ram, and sprouts.

She had said to Chef, “Just tonight, let me take care of things?” And he’d heard that it had been a full day of her wheedling before Chef had grunted and surrendered the kitchen to her stewardship. After she’d washed alongside the kitchen maids and washing boys until only an hour’s work remained for one person - she’d sent them all on, to sleep before the light of the next day would draw them out of their beds, back to their usual schedule of finishing the prep and starting the cooking for the next round of meals.

Their scene set, she brought him in from his work in the rotunda. Dirty dishes, a few ingredients, the oven still hot, and a kitchen to themselves. She had explained, and he’d had a good laugh, and then agreed to indulge her.

It is so rare that they have time to themselves. There is a constant rhythm of life that befuddles him, now. The echoes of life in this room, the belly of the fortress - hunting. Eating. Preparing. Cleaning. He always feels distanced when surrounded by this type of bustle. The consistency of motion, the chorus of unspoken commands - so many slight variations of “please move,” “I need that ladle,” and “hold this for a moment.” The confusion makes him feel like he still dreams, his soul apart.

And now the ghosts of that frantic labor are reduced to neat piles around them. Curing meat, sliced cheeses, and vegetables soaking for the morrow. The room is warm and the light shines on drifting specks of flour and dust. He watches his vhenan watching the sunset at Skyhold. His heart fills, regret and need and hope all so close together, and he thinks again, “I must tell her.” But the part of him that has always been a coward shrinks back, and just wants to watch her watch the world fall into shadow.

“If it’s not ready by now, it never will be.” She says.

He closes his book slowly and sets it on the table beside his knee.

“The smell is certainly appealing. The lavender comes through strong, but I can also detect the vanilla.”

She closes out the sunset and brings down the bar that locks the door. She crosses back over the room and swings the loaf paddle down from its hook. Metal scrapes along the stone bed as she hooks under the skillet and draws it out, balancing the little stoneware easily enough. She swivels and sets the sweetbread down on a pad next to him.

They survey the results.

She shakes her head. He tilts his gaze down to her.

He reaches out a knuckle and she watches him knock on the unyielding brick of its crust.

“Is this what I asked for, _da’len?”_

“No, _Tar’len.”_ She pouts, and he pushes his book further away, and at last the time has come.

He leans close her because her hair smells like the vanilla, sugar, and lavender she worked with. He stoops to breathe her in as he traces her ear with his lips.

She shudders.

“Is this task so difficult for you?”

“Yes, _Tar’len,_ apparently so.” She says.

He chuckles, and so near her ear it makes her sway slightly, leaning forward against him. He slips his hands down her arms and then holds her waist. She might lunge forward to grind against him but she stops herself - and then he reaches around, sinking his forehead to the crook of her neck, and squeezes her ass. He is already rigid, and if she notices his erection pressing up against his breeches she does not betray her attention.

He whispers, “Get the spoon for me.”

She convulses in the heat of one full-body shiver, and then another, and for a second he wonders if she - ? But she collects herself at once. She twists in his embrace and reaches around him and lifts, from behind him, from where it is tucked among various other long-handled tools: the wooden mixing spoon.

He tilts his head, still fondling the fullness of her ass in both hands, and sees that she can’t control her smile as she holds the spoon. It is a light wood, blonde, and it is heavier than a kitchen implement. The bowl is wider, at least her middle finger’s length across.

He traces one hand up to her mid-back, holding her lightly. Then, rough and sudden, he yanks her pants and smalls down over her ass and she cries out. He lifts her, grunts, sweeps her legs aside, angles her, and lays her over his lap. She’s too far up and he shifts her, scooching her down so that her backside is positioned squarely on his lap; his erection presses against the meet of her legs and she moans and wiggles, wicked. After allowing himself only a moment to enjoy her grinding, he reaches up and gives her ear a hard flick.

Her moan keens into a high-pitched whine.

“None of that,” he says, sternly, and plucks the spoon from her grasp. She settles, resentful, and he dips his fingers along the grain of the wood. Then he presses the spoon to her ass and circles it; he is only circling it, rubbing slowly on her skin.

“I was very clear on the ingredients, was I not?”

“Yes, _Tar’len.”_

“But I saw you leave out the yeast, _da’len_. Did you do so on purpose?”

“N-no, _Tar’len,”_ she says, but the way her voice drops coyly is his signal in this play, and he raps the spoon down hard on her ass.

“Aah!” She chirps, and he asks again.

“Did you _knowingly_ disobey me, _da’len?”_

“Yes,” she admits, and looks back at him over her shoulder with rebellion hard and glistening in her eyes and teeth. _“So what?”_

He strokes a hand over the curve of her ass. His cock is straining to move against her; he feels himself grown thick and heavy. But his mind is clear - possessed of a singular focus of purpose that makes it impossible for her to infuriate him with this insolence.

“So…” he circles the spoon. Taps it once.

Then in a double: tap-tap, just very light.

“So, I can only imagine you did so to an end. Did you… think I would not notice?”

“No.”

_Tap-tap._

“Did you think I would prefer this result?”

“No.”

_Tap-tap._

“Did you think you knew how to make the sweetbread better than the instruction I gave you?”

A pause.

She whispers, “Yes.”

_Whap._

He brings the spoon down once, twice, three times with a cracking that echoes off the stone bricks.

She writhes and cries out. He pins down her back with his other hand, smiling softly.

“Ah, _da’len._ The follies of _pride._ And for it, you will have a stinging bottom. Do you think the nobles in the hall will guess,” he wonders, grinning “when you limp past them at their gossip?”

She snarls and bucks, ass bobbing as she tries to scramble away, and he fists his hand into her shirt and drags her back, holding her across his legs roughly. The clay skillet and the inedible pastry crash to the floor and break apart, and she is making a yowling sound like an errant kitten.

“This punishment is not over, _da’len,”_ he warns.

She gives up struggling and collapses her head into her elbow; it’s a ridiculously exaggerated pout, and he withholds a chuckle. When she is resigned, he relaxes. Leans back and observes her already reddening backside, her disheveled clothing half-off, the rapid rise and fall of her back as she catches her breath. He is entirely at his leisure. He spins the spoon lazily between his fingers. He is calm; he might even seem indifferent to her… unless she could catch the flicker of tension as the smooth muscle of his forearm flexes.

“After this, you will wash the dishes.” He instructs. And then he brings the spoon down, and she squeals, and it turns to moans.

And he thinks of how he will take her from behind as she bends over the washing basin, his hand cupped under her chin, his other hand slamming her hips back against him, and he will tell her, “Mind the washing,” soothingly, as she wails and begs and moans, and as she keeps trying to work through the fullness and the ache of him pumping himself into her. He will ignore the desperate uncaging of his mind, his howling wants - he will be controlled, and not impulsive, and he will take her steadily and then - _thwack_ \- and then… and _then he will fuck her, he will_ fuck _her…_

He is hot with sweat as her ass pinks beneath the spoon; the sky through the window reddens into night. She rubs on his lap. Her cries chorus with his drumming on her, of her: _tap-tap, tap-tap, tap, whap. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack._


	11. the road of evening

**Prompt: Stream: Softly along the road of evening, / In a twilight dim with rose, / wrinkled with old age, and drenched with dew, / Old Nod, the shepherd, goes. (Nod, Walter de la Mare)**

His breath is hot. His teeth scrape on her knee and his lips are clammy and warm; drool slimes her leg. Pangara remembers the last time she cradled a dog like this. Its breathing comes too quickly. It wheezes. She will bleed it to its death in a little while, but for now she holds him on her lap.

Pangara had already been half-out of dreams when Deshanna had pulled the curtain aside. The Keeper had led the dog through the dark. And Pangara had known at once, sitting up in her cot and looking down. She had dressed slowly.

“You may have been a little shem godling, and you may have led their armies, but here you are still First,” Deshanna had said to her when she’d come home. And technically she still leads armies - but her extended stay in Wycome is a reprieve Josephine has arranged, meant to last only a few months. The clan prepares to replace her. The testing grounds need another week’s preparation. She will play a vital role in the transfer of her duties to another and then… and then she will no longer be First, and the life she prepared to give to her community will be no more.

Deshanna had stroked Pangara’s hair and then she’d left them together. Banlen was still wriggly, even given his age. He’d scented her chamber pot and nosed towards it and she’d had to wrestle and push him back - he vomited every feeding, every drop of liquid and now when she pissed he looked at her eagerly as if he hoped she poured water for him.

Banlen, bulky and gentle and with russet fur. He’d protected the clan ten winters. There was nothing more Deshanna could do for the fists growing under his belly.

He pants now. Pangara knows he is so thirsty. Into the rough spring dawn the sounds of water roll off the hickories and pines. The wind is still from the east, and icy.

She’d led the old hound out of the little encampment. They’d walked side-by-side into the trees and the light rain and she’d not minded the weather. He’d wagged his tail like he was not ill. Clan Lavellan maintained a hunter’s stopover outside the walls of Wycome. Pangara had felt more comfortable staying just inside the forest than in a bedroom in the city. When the Anchor woke her with painful nightmares - eyes and rifts and fires flickering through her dreams - she only disturbed those few neighbors who were gone most nights anyway.

But one of the hunting cores had returned the evening prior, so Faerlin, Davys, and Chel had been out on their porch when she’d walked past with Banlen at her heels. Chel had lifted a hand and waved. Pangara had nodded. Davys and Faerlin kept bent over their arrows - Davys setting a cowhorn nock, Faerlin weighing the deflection of a shaft’s spine. Neither had looked up at her as she passed. Banlen had taken lead, guiding her through the trees.

Faerlin had never forgiven Pangara for kissing Chel when they were ten.

_Ten._

More than two decades later and _still._

Banlen’s breath comes out with a little bit of whine. Pangara peels a strip of fat from a tail of jerky. She lets him snuffle it from her fingers.

“People don’t like to forget, do they, Banny?” He burps and looks at her, surprised.

The canopy drips overhead. In the distance a call from a diggyhawk caws over the morning. Branches sway and drums of dew drop down to the forest floor, disturbed by one squirrel trying to escape from another. Faint light pops through the shifting pines.

This trail winding alongside the Hookpole Stream has been worn by ages of feet and aravels. The grass is worn aside to bare the fine earth, and the hunters have been tending the branches fallen by winter snow, keeping the path clear - although the clan will summer in the city this year.

Where is he walking now? The thought comes to her banging desperate and caged against the walls of her mind and she actually utters a sound like rage - Banlen senses her changed mood and his breathing stops; he glances up at her, mouth closed, wondering. And then because it feels like Solas is a wandering soldier pacing strides horizon to horizon she digs her fingers into his fur and she releases. She can’t help it. She hates it, but she knows that the thoughts won’t go away otherwise; and so gritting her teeth, she lets her mind trawl the many corners of the land: do his feet crunch into the snow? Does he pull his staff from a pool of mud and grimace? Are his clothes torn, has he bothered to mend them? Are his hands worn and blistered from scrambling up the slope of some hot red bowl of rock, sand smacking into his eyes? Does he smile softly when it rains - does he wonder if it’s raining on her, too. Does he wonder where she is. Does he look at the sky and think of her beneath it.

She exhales a shaky breath.

She wants to know. She wants to know. She tries to direct her dreaming every night, and every night…

Banlen leaks a soft string of vomit onto the shoreline, making little gulping sounds that match her own pathetic sobs. He is like all dogs at their weakest: embarrassed and scared, and trying to move away from her - but she holds him tightly and will not let him go.

That she let herself be made vulnerable to a man who once burned his own ass with fire - to a man who more than once misjudged the amount of ice he was manifesting out of the Fade and had to be knocked free - these are the things that make it so that she cannot truly cry. She can only creak and moan open-mouthed and her eyes are always completely, infuriatingly dry. She used to cry - though, not easily. Usually only when her mind spiralled quicker and quicker and her breath refused to come out of her. Then sometimes she would cry with the fear of it. Or, afterwards, with the embarrassment.

But now she just makes sad noises until what’s coming out of her is strangled laughter. Because he left. He left without saying goodbye. He left.

And the pressure of that rings in her mind like chimes strung between the trees. Always fluttering, then clanging in a harsh cry of: you could have kept him if you could have found him if you could have known if if if if

She lifts her face up to the rain and wants to not feel so much like the pull of the world is all pulling her to him.

Chel had held her. Chel had asked, “Was he nice?” in a way that said she doubted this was the case.

“He’s kind. He wants to be kind,” Pangara had replied. The nightmare had been especially loud. Chel had come in through the window like she always used to do.

“He’s not very good at it.” Chel had grimaced and pushed Pangara’s hair back from her forehead the same way he always would, with his fingers long and every time stained with some different color of paint.

“He tries.” Pangara had said, softly. Why she defended him… why she had been defending him, from the moment he’d pulled away from her so suddenly, she didn’t know.

She knows.

Banlen coughs and gags and the rest of his body is very still except for his tail, which wags when she speaks to him and tells him all the old stories about dogs and their companions.

She remembers the way he pushed her hair back. She remembers him on his knees in the river, looking up at her like a man at worship - like a man desperate for some kind of divinity. She remembers him laughing: winning at chess, the rock in his hips when they danced, his tone trying not to be too eager when he taught her the words that went with the letters she received. She remembers him nights, his sweat and his smell like pine, like pepper - and always something sweet still on his breath.

“He tries so hard,” she’d said to Chel. “I think… I think that’s why. Really. Don’t look at… don’t give me that look. I think he thought he was being… kind.”

Somehow.

The rain is just like the fall of a thousand bells dull into the dirt. It mixes the dirt to mud. The morning passes and after telling him all the hounds’ tales: chasing Fen’Harel off across the Fade, the Mabari at the Hero’s side who drove back the Blight with only the ringing of his bark and the flash of his jaw, the dog who found Chel walking out to sea, she moves on to telling Banlen stories of wolves. The wolves who ran with the Emerald Knights into battle. She removes her knife. She kisses him very firmly on his cheek and immediately feels regret when she sees how it makes his eye roll. She feels instinctively that she’s stumbled onto some sort of aggressive behavior by bringing her mouth so close to his. She strokes his cheek instead and rubs behind his ear until he is somewhat calm again, although he is still breathing too fast, too hot.

She pulls out the little branch she’d snapped off as they’d passed into the deep forest. She wriggles it above his gaze. Banlen’s eyes go bright; his mouth closes, then drops open. She drops the branch and he snaps out and grasps the oak in his jaw and with precision and speed she opens a path for his spirit.

The rain makes mud and the mud is red.

Pangara sits and strokes the fur and when she has no more stories of hounds, she tells the stories of wolves.

And she remembers. And she wonders. She wonders where he is. Where he walks and whether he travels well; where it is he’s going. And she wonders if she will ever look at the world without seeing him: this man forever roaming, head bent beneath the rain, down every red and muddy road.


End file.
